Classical philosophy defines the human being as a rational animal. In traditional ilm al-mantiq, “animal” denotes the genus (jins), the broader category that man shares with other living beings. Like other animals, the ox, the bird or the bee, he eats, sleeps, breathes, reproduces and dies. Understood at this level, human existence is continuous with biological life.
What distinguishes him is the differentia (fasl): rationality. The human being is not merely a living organism; it is a living organism endowed with intellect, reason and the faculty of speech. This rational capacity is not an accidental feature added to animality; it is the defining principle through which biological existence becomes specifically human existence.
Islamic philosophical and gnostic traditions, however, do not consider rationality sufficient to capture the fullness of the human condition. Man is also understood as a being oriented towards perfection (kamāl). In the doctrine of al-insān al-kāmil (the Perfect Human), he appears as a locus in which divine attributes are progressively realised through a process of existential becoming. Reason (ʿaql), in this sense, is not simply an intellectual faculty; it is a guiding principle that directs man towards meaning, order and fulfilment.
A more integrated account is offered by Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, the Iranian-Lebanese political thinker, who resists reducing human reality to a single explanatory principle. Human existence, for him, appears as a structured unity of interdependent capacities, each illuminating a distinct dimension of the same anthropological whole. For Sadr, man is first a volitional and rational agent, endowed with reason (‘aql) and will (irada). Unlike purely natural entities governed by necessity, human action is characterised by a degree of freedom, even if conditioned. This introduces moral accountability as an intrinsic feature of human existence. Second, this being is not an isolated subject but is constitutively shaped by external conditions – material environment, historical context and social surroundings. His agency operates within constraints rather than in absolute autonomy. Third, human beings are inherently social beings (madani bi’l-tab‘). Interaction, mutual dependence and exchange are structural necessities of human life, not contingent features. Society, in this regard, is the necessary condition within which human potential is actualised. Finally, and most decisively, man is a theocentric being: a created and purposive existence whose meaning and teleology are anchored in divine intentionality. This relation is not merely devotional; it is constitutive of identity, value and destiny.
“If man is defined by reason, freedom and an orientation towards meaning and perfection, a further question follows: what kind of social world is required for such a being to realise its potential (quwwah) into actuality (fi‘l)?”
Human life does not reach fulfilment simply by persisting. It unfolds through the development of capacities that require a supportive environment. Every individual carries within himself a horizon of possibility, yet its realisation depends upon the structure of the world he inhabits. Society, therefore, cannot be treated as a neutral arrangement of individuals; it is the field within which human potential is either enabled or constrained.
This question finds its most systematic classical articulation in the work of al-Farabi, one of the most influential philosophers in the Islamic intellectual tradition. For al-Farabi, human societies fall into two broad categories: perfect and imperfect. He holds that man is by nature social and political (madani bi’l-tabʿ), unable to sustain himself in isolation, and that only through cooperation can he attain his highest perfection. As he writes:
“In order to preserve himself and to attain his highest perfection, every human being is by his very nature in need of many things which he cannot provide all by himself; he is indeed in need of people who each supply him with some particular need of his. Everybody finds himself in the same relation to everybody in this respect. Therefore man cannot attain the perfection, for the sake of which his inborn nature has been given to him, unless many (societies of ) people who cooperate come together who each supply everybody else with some particular need of his, so that as a result of the contribution of the whole community all the things are brought together which everybody needs in order to preserve himself and to attain perfection.”
Human fulfilment, on this account, is inseparable from a structure of mutual dependence. It is realised within a shared order rather than in isolation.
In al-Farabi’s thought, the city represents the organised expression of this interdependence. What is commonly described as a “political” order reflects, at a deeper level, an ontological condition: human perfection depends upon coordinated life with others. The city is therefore not a mere aggregation of individuals but an ordered whole in which cooperation takes determinate form.
Within this structure, al-Farabi assigns a central role to the ruler (ra’is) who is “the most perfect in his specific qualification” and occupies the highest rank in what he terms the virtuous city (al-madinah al-fadhilah). This figure is not simply an administrator of collective affairs. He is, in the Platonic sense, a philosopher-king, whose authority rests on intellectual and moral excellence. He governs through knowledge of the good and of the conditions under which human beings can attain fulfilment. This unity of intellectual and ethical perfection enables him to direct collective life towards its ultimate end: happiness (saʿadah). Happiness, for al-Farabi, is not pleasure or material accumulation. It is the realisation of human perfection through reason and virtue.
What a tragedy that an unequal world takes not only bread from the hungry, but lets a life complete in essence pass through existence without ever becoming itself
Al-Farabi illustrates this order through the analogy of the body. Just as the body is composed of differentiated organs, each with its own distinct function yet all ordered towards the unity of the whole, so too the city is composed of diverse human capacities oriented towards a shared end. This implies that order within the city is not uniformity but proportionate arrangement. Justice is the preservation of this order: each part fulfils its proper role in accordance with its nature, and harmony emerges from their coordinated functioning. The virtuous city (al-madinah al-faḍilah) is thus a society structured by reason, justice and virtue, where the wellbeing of the citizens is not external to its purpose but coincident with it. From this perspective, happiness is not an isolated achievement. It comes through collective life, where each person’s fulfilment is inseparable from the fulfilment of others.
It is important to note that the virtuous city is not defined by wealth, power or pleasure but by the systematic cultivation of intellectual and moral capacities that enable the transition from potentiality to actuality. Where this teleological order is disrupted, the city ceases to function as a space of perfection and becomes a site of deviation. Al-Farabi defines such cities as non-virtuous (vicious) cities. In these settings, false ends displace the true meaning of human fulfilment, reason is subordinated to appetite and cooperation is misdirected towards the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, power or domination as ultimate goals. In more extreme cases, these appear as ignorant, wicked, erring or deviant regimes, each representing a different distortion of human faculties. Against this, al-Farabi maintains that the remedy is not violence or upheaval but philosophical education: a reorientation of knowledge towards truth. He further extends the architecture of virtuous city beyond a single the city to progressively wider forms of collective existence: from the small virtuous city to the virtuous nation and ultimately to a universal association of nations oriented towards happiness, in which cooperation remains aligned with human perfection at every level.
“Having examined the Farabian Model, one may now ask whether the contemporary world, in any meaningful sense, corresponds to the Farabian conception of virtuous city (al-madinah al-faḍilah) or departs from it? If human beings, through cooperation, are meant to move from potentiality (quwwah) to actuality (fiʿl) and thereby realise their intellectual, moral and existential capacities, does contemporary collective life instantiate such an order oriented towards human perfection (saʿadah)? Or does it, instead, constitute a condition in which this very end is systematically obstructed, reducing human existence to mere survival, concerned only with sustenance, shelter and continuity?”
The question, however, cannot be answered in abstract principle alone, since it requires an examination of the actual structure of contemporary collective life. For al-Farabi, it is the organisation of the city that determines whether human capacities are cultivated or obstructed, since the city is the most concrete expression of social being. In this sense, the structure of the city becomes the privileged site for examining the relation between human potential and its realisation. Under modern conditions, however, the city no longer presents itself as a unified ethical totality. Nor does it resemble al-Farabi’s organic analogy of a harmoniously ordered body. Instead, it appears as a stratified spatial formation, internally differentiated by radically unequal conditions of life. What is called “the city” is, in effect, a coexistence of multiple cities within a single geographical frame – each governed by distinct thresholds of access to opportunity, security and development.
This stratification becomes most visible at the lowest threshold of urban life, where the basic conditions of human development are either fragile or absent. It is here that informal settlements emerge as the most concentrated expression of urban deprivation. Slums, in this sense, are not marginal anomalies but structurally embedded formations of global urbanisation. They are typically characterised by overlapping forms of deprivation – unsafe and inadequate housing, overcrowding, lack of clean water and sanitation, insecure tenure and exposure to environmental hazards – manifesting in varying degrees of intensity across contexts. In global urban studies, such conditions are not treated as exceptional; rather, they are understood as constitutive of contemporary urban growth.
According to United Nations estimates, 57 per cent of the global population now resides in urban areas, a figure expected to rise to 68 per cent by 2050, driven primarily by urban expansion in Asia and Africa. Within this broader transformation, approximately 1.1 billion people currently live in slums, representing nearly one-fifth of the global urban population. These averages, however, conceal deep structural asymmetries: while slum prevalence is minimal in high-income contexts, it becomes dominant in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, in some cases exceeding 70 to 90 per cent of urban populations. Over recent decades, this condition has not diminished but expanded in absolute terms. From approximately 895 million, the global slum population has grown to over 1.1 billion, reflecting the persistence of deprivation alongside rapid urbanisation. In many low-income regions, close to half of the urban population resides in slums, significantly above the global average. In selected national contexts, this condition becomes dominant rather than residual. For instance, in Pakistan approximately 56 per cent of the urban population, around 52.57 million people, lives in slums, while in India the proportion has declined from about 55 per cent in 2002 to 41.5 per cent in 2022, although the absolute number of affected individuals remains substantial. These patterns suggest something deeper than poverty understood in purely economic terms. What is at stake is the structured production of urban spaces in which the elementary conditions of human development remain unevenly distributed. Alongside material deprivation, these environments are marked by institutional exclusion, restricted access to formal labour markets, limited credit systems and the cumulative effects of spatial stigma.
Earlier urban scholarship had already identified the structural nature of this condition. Studies of post-war urbanisation in the Global South describe the rapid growth of cities as producing “refuse dumps of human misery,” where large segments of the population are absorbed into precarious forms of shelter – bustees, chawls, shanty towns and informal settlements – without corresponding integration into civic or economic systems. Urbanisation, in this sense, generated a divided urban order: one segment incorporated into infrastructures of stability and opportunity, the other confined to informal economies of survival.
From a Farabian perspective, such stratification cannot be interpreted as morally neutral. If the purpose of collective existence lies in the cultivation of human perfection through cooperation, then a condition in which large populations remain confined to survival-oriented existence represents a philosophical disjunction between human nature and social form. It is not that human capacities are absent in such contexts. Rather, the institutional and material conditions required for their actualisation are unevenly distributed. Life is thereby reduced to its biological continuity, what classical thought distinguishes as zoe, while the possibilities of meaningful participation, recognition and development remain restricted, closer to what may be called bios in its fuller sense.
What, then, is this condition? Considered in light of the integrated anthropology articulated by Musa al-Sadr, it appears as a situation in which the very conditions of human actuality are systematically undermined. A being who, as Sadr suggests, is a volitional agent, a socially constituted existence, and a theocentric creature oriented towards meaning, finds itself confined within forms of life that fall short of its own ontological horizon. The result is not merely deprivation, but a suspension of becoming: individuals are effectively obstructed in the full realisation of what it means to become human. At the level of collective existence, vast populations are reduced to conditions that fall beneath the threshold of human dignity, thereby foreclosing precisely those capacities that al-Farabi regarded as the very telos of political association.
“What becomes of the human being when the world required for him to move from potentiality to actuality is systematically absent? When he can eat, sleep, breathe, reproduce and die but cannot meaningfully exercise agency, participate in a structured cooperation or orient himself towards higher ends. What kind of existence is this? Is it still human existence in the full sense? Or has something essential been stripped away?”
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben conceptualises such a condition as bare life (nuda vita), a concept developed in his work Homo Sacer (1995). For Agamben, bare life is life stripped of all political status, all legal protection and all social form, reduced to its biological minimum. It is life that can be killed without it constituting murder or sacrifice. Drawing on the Greek distinction between zoe and bios, Agamben observes that zoe refers to mere biological existence, the fact of living shared across all living beings, whereas bios denotes a qualified form of life, one embedded in meaning, purpose and political recognition. In classical thought, this distinction mapped onto the separation between household and political community. Zoe belonged to the private sphere, to the simple fact of living – the life of eating, sleeping, breathing, reproducing and dying. Bios was the proper life of the city, a qualified way of living. The life of a citizen, a philosopher, a craftsman.
Modern politics promised to overcome this separation, to integrate zoe into the political realm, to transform mere life into a life of dignity. But Agamben argues that modernity has not fulfilled this promise. Instead, it has produced bare life: zoe stripped of bios, life abandoned by law, excluded from political recognition, reduced to its biological minimum, yet still held within the political order in the form of its exclusion. To be reduced to bare life is therefore to retain only biological existence while being deprived of meaningful political and social existence. It is, in essence, a condition of dehumanisation: acknowledged as living, but not fully recognised as a bearer of claims, rights or voice. Agamben illustrates this through the archaic Roman figure of homo sacer, a person who could be killed with impunity but not sacrificed.
It is important to acknowledge that Agamben develops this framework primarily in relation to the state of exception, most clearly exemplified in the concentration camp, where individuals are held outside the protections of normal law. His paradigmatic figures are the refugee and the camp detainee, both of whom exist in spaces where legal order is suspended. Extending this framework to the context of slums is therefore not an assertion of equivalence but an analytical translation: an attempt to deploy Agamben’s conceptual vocabulary to illuminate forms of life that, while not identical to his empirical cases, exhibit structurally analogous conditions of partial abandonment.
The slum is not the concentration camp. The camp, according to Agamben, is the space where the exception becomes permanent law. He writes: "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule." An absolute abandonment. The camp dweller has no legal status whatsoever. His reduction to bare life is absolute.
The slum, by contrast, is open, porous and shaped by complex economic, historical and social forces. It is not a space of total enclosure or sovereign control. The slum dweller is not outside the law but inside it in a qualified sense: formally included within legal and political systems, yet practically unprotected. He may possess documentation, citizenship, and even voting rights, but these do not reliably translate into security. Eviction, demolition, and dispossession remain constant possibilities. The camp represents absolute exclusion; the slum represents dispersed and normalised abandonment. Yet in both cases, life remains exposed to vulnerability while being only partially secured by the political order to which it formally belongs.
The relation between the slum and the camp is therefore not one of identity but of structural resonance. The extension of Agamben’s framework to slums must accordingly be understood in graded terms. The slum does not reproduce the logic of absolute abandonment; rather, they express a differentiated configuration of bare life – inclusion without full recognition, survival without meaningful participation. A life that is permitted to persist but not to become what it is capable of being.
Although Agamben’s framework offers the primary lens for understanding bare life, it may be further extended through adjacent theoretical perspectives on space and political subjectivity, particularly those developed by Michel Foucault. Foucault, whose work on biopolitics is a key influence on Agamben, develops a related spatial concept in his notion of heterotopia. In his 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes spaces that are simultaneously embedded within and set apart from the social totality, such as cemeteries, prisons, ships and colonies. These are real spaces that function as counter-sites: locations in which ordinary spatial, legal and social relations are reorganised, suspended or inverted. A prison, for instance, remains physically within the city yet operates under a distinct normative order that isolates its inhabitants from ordinary civic life. A cemetery lies within the town yet is governed by a separate regime of meaning and ritual. A ship is materially enclosed yet socially self-contained, moving through but not fully belonging to the spaces it traverses.
The slum can be understood as a heterotopic formation in this Foucauldian sense. It is within the city but not fully of it. Like other counter-sites, it is marked by a partial detachment from the dominant legal and institutional order. The formal rules governing property, tenure and due process are unevenly applied, selectively enforced or effectively suspended. As legal scholarship has observed, informal settlements are "in part detached from the official legal order" and possess "an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, separate from the state legal system operative outside it". The slum thus appears as a space of double inscription: visible yet not fully recognised, present yet not fully protected. In Foucault’s terms, it functions as a counter-site in which the ordinary promises of political order are both present and structurally compromised.
Agamben’s idea of the “zone of indistinction” further clarifies this condition. The slum emerges as a threshold in which the distinctions between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion and zoe and bios become indistinguishable. The slum dweller is included in the contemporary urban order but included in the mode of zoe, not bios. The slum dweller is not situated outside the urban order but is instead incorporated within it in the modality of zoe rather than bios. Life is sustained at the level of biological continuity, yet the social and institutional conditions that would transform mere survival into meaningful existence remain absent. This is not simple exclusion. It is a form of inclusion in which abandonment becomes the governing logic. The slum thus appears as a zone of indistinction, where the classical separation between oikos and polis is blurred and the modern promise of universal inclusion reveals its internal limit.
From within this framework, the forms of abandonment operative in the slum may be analytically differentiated along three interrelated dimensions.
The first is legal precarity. The slum dweller often occupies a legally insecure position. Presence on land may be de facto tolerated without corresponding de jure recognition. In many cases, tenure remains informal or unregularised, and protection under property and planning law is unevenly applied. Legal norms may recognise certain entitlements in principle, such as housing rights or protections against eviction, while their implementation remains inconsistent in practice. Judicial interventions may, at times, affirm protection, while administrative or lower-level decisions proceed in the opposite direction. The result is not complete absence of law but a condition in which law’s protective function is rendered unstable and unreliable.
The second is exposure to dispossession and violence. Forced evictions and demolitions of slum dwellers are widely documented across urban contexts. According to UN-Habitat, at least 2 million people are forcibly evicted every year, and millions more are threatened with eviction. While often justified through planning or regulatory frameworks, their implementation is frequently characterised by weak accountability and limited compensation. In this context, legal ambiguity translates into material vulnerability, as residents remain exposed to displacement without stable institutional safeguards.
The third is political limitation. Although slum dwellers are formally included within electoral systems, their integration into substantive structures of political decision-making remains constrained. Limited access to education, weak organisational representation, and peripheral positioning within policy processes restrict their effective political voice. Jacques Ranciere’s notion of “the part of no part” is useful here: a condition in which subjects are visible within the political order but are not fully recognised as participants in the distribution of political voice and authority. The slum dweller approximates this condition. He appears within the political order without fully having a part in it – not because he is absent, but because his presence does not translate into equal political intelligibility or influence.
The question, when pursued to its limit, discloses a form of existence in the slum in which life persists without the conditions that allow human potential to be actualised. It is neither absolute exclusion nor full inclusion, but a suspended condition in which life is maintained without being institutionally supported in its development. What Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life” is instructive here, not as a metaphor of absence, but as an analytic description of life reduced to its most minimal threshold, where recognition, agency, participation and meaningful belonging are weakened or missing. The problem, therefore, is not merely material deprivation but a deeper ontological and political disjunction between human capacity and the institutional world required for its realisation. The slum, in this sense, does not stand outside the political order but emerges from within it as one of its most concentrated expressions: a space in which existence is sustained, yet its movement beyond mere survival is systematically arrested.
As established earlier, Al-Farabi conceives the virtuous city as an order structured through cooperative relations oriented toward happiness (sa‘adah), the ultimate end of human life, within which, human capacities are progressively actualised through participation in a shared ethical life. Read through this standard, the question is no longer whether cooperation exists within modern societies, but whether it is organised in a manner that enables the universal unfolding of human potential. The contemporary condition reveals a fundamental tension: cooperation persists in formal terms, yet it does not culminate in shared human flourishing.
The implication is not that the Farabian ideal is flawed; rather, it is that contemporary social reality no longer unfolds within the conditions it presupposes. Modern urban order, in this light, reflects a structural rupture in the Farabian teleology of human actualisation, producing a biopolitical condition in which the passage from zoe to bios remains incomplete.
Within this fractured order, two populations live side by side, inhabiting the same spatial world while inhabiting radically different conditions of life. Their coexistence is geographical, not existential.
One population sends its children to school with bags full of books and heads full of dreams. The other sends its children to scavenge garbage or work in hazardous labour, with large sacks filled with garbage on their tiny, fragile backs, carrying burdens of responsibility far heavier than their childhood. One has access to clean water, electricity, sanitation and hospitals. The other drinks from contaminated sources, has no sewage system and cannot afford to see a doctor when a child falls sick. One lives with food security, with regular meals and the dignity of choice. The other lives under conditions of uncertainty, where nourishment depends on contingency and scarcity, and where children may go to sleep hungry, tears drying on their cheeks, the night stretching long, and the morning offering no promise. One has access to prenatal care, safe childbirth, postnatal support and menstrual knowledge and hygiene. The other gives birth without proper medical assistance, with maternal mortality rates many times higher, and where women are left without access to menstrual care or knowledge, abandoned even in the most ordinary and natural realities of their bodies. One expects all its children to survive past the age of five. The other buries children who die from preventable diseases – diarrhoea, pneumonia, malnutrition – that cost little to treat.
One has legally recognised ownership of its homes, protected by property laws and sleeps without fear. The other can be evicted at any time, with no compensation; its home bulldozed while the family watches, living in constant precarity, under the ever-present possibility that what little they have built may be destroyed – along with the slow, unbearable burden of a home that may never be allowed to become real. One has stable jobs with predictable income, labour rights and social protection. The other works in unpredictable, precarious conditions – day labour, begging, recycling waste – with no security, no chance of upward mobility, no benefits, and no safety net. One has easy access to legal representation, understands its rights and can navigate the legal system with ease. The other does not. The law is expensive, its procedures are complex and most remain unaware of what rights they even possess. One participates fully in political life – voting, shaping narratives, speaking freely, lobbying and influencing policy. The other is allowed only the gesture of participation; it may vote, but its voice and presence do not translate into power. One is seen and recognised as fully human. The other is visible as a problem, a blight, an eyesore – but invisible as a person with hopes, fears, dreams and rights. One dreams of what its children might become – doctors, engineers, teachers, artists, scholars, philosophers, leaders. The other dreams only of surviving the night. One plans for the future; the other remains preoccupied with immediate survival. One is socially recognised as possessing dignity as a given condition of personhood. The other must struggle to be recognised as what it already is.
Perhaps what is most difficult to bear is not the inequality of life, but the unequal distribution of the very possibility of becoming human. A human being who is not a mere body bound to necessity, nor a fragment of matter struggling for survival, but a being capable of transcendence beyond the immediacy of need. Such a being is endowed with faculties – intellect, will, imagination, perception, and action – each awaiting their passage into actuality. A being summoned to thought, to reflection, to the search for meaning, and to be formed through awareness and consciousness, rather than being confined to the repetition of survival.
Such a being is meant to flourish: to dwell in knowledge, to be awakened by wonder, to be formed in humility, to love and be loved, to become intoxicated with life, to be touched by poetry, softened by music and expanded by art. For whom existence is not mere maintenance, but the disclosure of meaning in heightened consciousness. For man is not made only for the earth beneath his feet, but for the vastness within his soul.
What a tragedy that an unequal world takes not only bread from the hungry, but lets a life complete in essence pass through existence without ever becoming itself.
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